Search form

Social networking links

Main menu

Main site sections

Emilie Savage-Smith

Professor of the History of Islamic Science

Emilie Savage-Smith, FBA, is recently retired as Professor of the History of Islamic Science at the Oriental Institute. She was a Senior Research Fellow of St Cross College, where she is currently acting as Archivist. Her most recent publication is a detailed catalogue of Arabic manuscripts on medicine in the Bodleian Librarian (Oxford University Press, 2012). The past decade she has also led a collaborative project between the Oriental Institute and the Bodleian Library that resulted in the electronic edition and translation of an early eleventh-century Arabic cosmology, available since March of 2007 at the website hosted by the Bodleian Library. As part of that project, a fuller edition and study (with co-author Yossef Rapoport) will be published in the summer of 2013 as An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The “Book of Curiosities”, edited with an annotated translation (Leiden: Brill, 2013). Other recent books include Medieval Islamic Medicine (with P.E. Pormann, Edinburgh 2007), and Medieval Views of the Cosmos (with E. Edson) published by the Bodleian Library in 2004, and a catalogue of the Oriental manuscripts at St Johns College (Oxford University Press, 2005).

She has recently been awarded a Wellcome Trust Senior Investigator Award for a project titled “A Literary History of Medicine: The Best Accounts of the Classes of Physicians by Ibn Abi Usaybi`ah (d. 1270)”. The three- and one-half-year project is a joint Oxford/Warwick project, in which Professor Savage-Smith will work in collaboration with Professor Simon Swain, Professor of Classics at the University of Warwick, in assembling a team of scholars to make this remarkable historical source fully available in a reliable and readable form. The recently retired Laudian Professor of Arabic, Geert Jan van Gelder, will be a vital part of this team, which will also include four post-doctoral posts.